Spreading Mozilla's Mission

Friday, July 29, 2011

Last Friday (7/22), Mozilla was hosting its first WSOH (World Series of Hack) -- an all-night hacking session designed for students currently interning in the Valley. The idea was to have a broad representation of companies on-site (the event was held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA), from top tech giants all the way to small startups. We had no less than 11 organizations joining us (10gen/MongoDB, Box, Dropbox, Flotype (now.js), Github, Google, Meebo, Ning, Scribd, and Yahoo!). Oh, and 5 HOUR ENERGY supplied the liquid fuel for our brains!

Approximately 200 students started 50 new projects as we began WSOH. Teams of up to 4 students were allowed for each project and all the project code is Open Sourced and available on Github. After twelve hours of hacking and caffeination, no less than 32 projects were lined up to compete for first place on the podium.

There were four main judging criteria: 1. Technology (does the demo showcase the power of open Web technologies?)2. Originality (how innovative and unique is the demo?)3. Aesthetics (how good is the visual design and interaction experience?)4. Practicality (how useful is this demo in enhancing the Web today?).

The maximum of points allocated to a project was 40 (10 points each).

Today, I'm happy to announce the winning projects:

- First Place: FuzzyPeach -- A Firefox addon that provides users with analytics about their productivity on the web. Includes functionality to block/limit access to unproductive websites.To be uploaded soon on AMO (https://addons.mozilla.org/)

- Second Place: Munchy Lunchy -- A super-easy way to find out where to go to lunch, whether alone or in a group. Powered by Django, Tornado, BrowserID, and magic.Link: http://munchylunchy.com/

- Third Place: Pigeon Carrier -- An integrated Twitter attachment system using Dropbox, Scribd, and new HTML 5 APIsLink: http://pigeoncarrier.com/

The three winning teams will be at Mozilla HQ on Friday (8/5) to give a live demo of their projects at 3pm PDT. Please join us on Air Mozilla (http://air.mozilla.org/) and IRC (irc.mozilla.org (#wsoh)) on August 5th, but for now, let's give a big round of applause to our winners and all the participants!!! Well done, guys!

And given how successful this event was, you can definitely count on another WSOH next summer. We may even hold a few local WSOH around the world... Ping me (julie@mozilla.com) if you're a student interested in hosting a local World Series of Hack at your university. I'd love to chat with you :)

Until then, happy hacking...

A special thanks to all the Mozillians behind this event, as well as all the company reps who took the time to come hang out with us last Friday!!!

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

As some of you may already know, Mozilla is organizing its very first WSOH (World Series of Hack) this summer. Originally scheduled for Thursday 22nd/Friday 23rd, we decided to push it to Friday night instead to accommodate the vast majority of interns.

It will still be held at the Computer History Museum, and we now have a vast panel of participating companies like Facebook, Github, Dropbox, 10gen/MongoDB, Inkling, Flotype (now.js), TuneIn, and a few more to come.

Each participating company is submitting a theme/API and we will be releasing the full list on Github on July 10th. There will also be an "open category", which will be judged mostly on creativity and overall technical difficulty. Teams of 3-4 will be formed onsite.

There will be food, music, caffeine, snacks, games, and internet-famous engineers from across land to guide you along the way. We will also release the list of prizes on July 10th -- no matter what, it will be worth your hard labor! ;)

==> We have a limited number of spots (300), and we've already went through over one third of our available tickets since last Thursday!

There are 2 ways you can participate:1. If you're a student interning in the Valley, please register yourself as an "intern"2. If your company would like to be represented at WSOH, please email me at julie@mozilla.com

To register, please use http://wsoh.eventbrite.com

Disclaimer: We have a limited number of tickets so priority will be given to *interns* who've RSVP'd to the event.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Come join Mozilla and over 300 interns and engineers from the Silicon Valley for a memorable hacking session at the Computer History Museum. Mozilla's first annual WSOH (World Series of Hack) will take place on July 21st-22nd!

Why WSOH? Well, our interns asked for a hacking session, we listened, and decided to go big. Why? Because it's a unique opportunity for interns from different universities, countries, and cultural backgrounds to work together to build something awesome. It's summer in The Valley, might as well be hacking.

We have a few ideas for themes ranging from building your own browser extension, to experimenting with HTML5 , or perhaps building data visualizations. Mozilla's mission is all about making the Web better, and we want you to be part of it. Final themes will be available on Github by July 10th and we will be sending updates to those who've registered.

Sounds exciting to you? Can't wait to get started? Well, RSVP today and come join us for an awesome hacking night. As always, we'll provide plenty of food, caffeine, snacks, music, prizes, entertainment, games, and internet-famous engineers from across the land to guide you along the way.

Oh, and the chance to show off your project in front of a great panel of judges!

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Mozilla will be participating in Stanford Open Source Bootcamp on April 23, 2011. The event is organized by ACM and has for objective to initiate the students with open source projects.

Mozilla will have 4 workshops, 2 Q&A sessions and 1 keynote. The event will kick off at 1pm PST and will continue until the early evening (7.30pm).

Below is a summary of the workshops offered by Mozilla. The goal is to truly engage with the students and make those workshops as interactive as possible (hence the pre-requisites for each session).

We'll monitor and answer questions on Twitter using #MozStanford starting Friday morning (PST). We have a Facebook event page for the occasion so feel free to check it out and leave comments there too.

Synopsis:“We'll take a naïvely built web app and turn it into something that can handle millions of users. Initial code will be provided and we'll evolve the design into something that scales using Amazon's EC2 for deployment and load testing.We'll be working on a webapp with Python and Django. Experience helpsbut isn't necessary. The code is simple.”

Requirements:• You'll need git if you want to check out the code locally.• Jeff will provide cloud servers with everything loaded up, so students should be comfortable working the command line if they want to write code.• Writing code is optional. Jeff can drive with suggestions from participants or they can send patches.

Workshop #2 - Frontend Development Foundations, Matthew Claypotch

Synopsis:“Every great web site needs a public face. Structuring your pages correctly will win you points in accessibility and maintainability, and win you points with search engines, In this session, we'll turn your resume from a PDF to a Pretty Dang Fine webpage. Learn to appreciate beautiful (and semantic!) HTML, classy CSS, and a splash of JavaScript.”

Synopsis:“The web is a dangerous place with talented criminals looking to destroy the apps that you spent so much time and effort creating. This workshop will be a hands on learning experience covering current threats to web applications. We'll use a vulnerable test application and perform hands on testing to understand these attacks and how to properly defend against them in our applications.”

Notes: Students can listen and follow along to Michael’s presentation or they can participate in hands-on learning on their own workstations while Michael works through some exercises. Issues are discussed at both a high level to cover overall impacts and also a detailed technical level for those interested.

Requirements (for hands-on exercises)• Windows or Mac OS• Download VMware player (free for Windows, vmfusion is available for mac but not free)• Download vulnerable web demoo http://sourceforge.net/projects/owaspbwa/files/0.93rc1/o This is nearly 1 gig and must be downloaded ahead of time (we will have the demo on flash drives too on Saturday)o More info here: http://people.mozilla.org/~mcoates/stanford.html

Workshop #4 – Hacking the Firefox UI, Shawn Wilsher & Frank Yan

Synopsis:“The firefox team will be providing a set of bugs, and will help the students implement them. Come contribute to the release of Firefox 6.0!”

Requirements:

1. Skills needed (this is an or list, not an and)- basic JS (JavaScript)- CSS/HTML- C++2. Things to have before you arrive- Have a bugzilla account already created so you can upload your patch. You can create one here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/createaccount.cgi- To ensure you get the most time possible to work with an engineer on a patch, please have successfully completed a build (https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Simple_Firefox_build).- We’ll be have 2 or 3 laptops setup as backups, but students should have their build and bugzilla account set up beforehand if possible.

Workshop #5 – Managing Software at Internet Scale, Christian Legnitto

Synopsis:“Talk about releases, project management, software updates, managing open source releases (Mozilla/Firefox) vs corporate releases (Apple/Mac OS X), etc. Targeted at junior-level engineers with people skills looking for something different for a potential career than coding all day. Can likely be combined with other Firefox team talks.”

Synopsis:“Starting your own open source project comes with its own set of challenges and (at times) counter-intuitive decisions to be made. Alex Limi will talk about what to watch out for if you're starting your own open source project, how to build a successful community, and even how to make money off your open source project.”

No requirements needed for this workshop/talk.

If you're part of a CS students-run organization and would like this type of workshops at your school, please get in touch with our College Recruiting team. We'll be happy to hear your thoughts and suggestions!

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Back in January, Mozilla was at MIT during its IAP to teach an HTML5 Gaming class. The course was spread out over a 5 day period and open to any student within the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department. The idea was to bring some of our Mozilla engineers and community members in front of the students for some hands-on experience with new web technologies. We covered various topics, such as JS, DOM (Document Object Model), the canvas element, WebGL, multimedia element (audio and video), and optimization and performance of JS. For the detailed schedule, please click here.

The class was very well received by the students and reinforced the fact that more of those "organic" courses need to happen between Mozilla and CS students. Another neat fact was that some students actually developed a few games to demonstrate what they had learn in the class.

Now, we want to reward the team that developed the best game, and this is where we need your help. Please check out each of the games (3) and let us know which one is your favorite by filling up this very quick survey. We'll invite the winning team to present at Mozilla HQ in Mountain View (CA) and we'll also broadcast it live on Air Mozilla.

Also, if you're part of a CS students-run organization and would like to find out more about how you can collaborate with Mozilla, please email us. We'd love to hear from you and come up with more awesome projects!

Stanford, October 5, 201011am – 3pm: Fall Career FairStanford Tech Talk to be announced as well soon

We encourage you to stop by our booth, attend our Tech Talks, and don't forget to drop off your resume. We have more dates saved up, especially in Europe and we will have all of these details available on our College Recruiting website (www.college.mozilla.com) in the upcoming days.

Also, please note that we're currently working on redesigning our college website and we should have all of our summer interns' presentations available by October 15th at the very latest. For now, you can however check out air.mozilla.com on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week (09/15-16-17) at 1pm PST to watch some live presentations of our interns (yes, we still do have interns in our office!).

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Over the years, Mozilla went from hiring only a handful of interns to now having over 30 students during the summer. They come from different academic backgrounds and different countries, with the shared objective of improving the web.At Mozilla, our goal is to expose the students to our open source environment, and therefore demonstrate the importance of a community driven project.What Mozilla offers is more than a summer internship: it's an open invitation to becoming a meaningful contributor to the project. And when we say that your work matters, we actually mean it. Let's take the recent release of Firefox 3.6 for example. All of our 2009 engineering interns actually committed code that became part of Firefox 3.6! Where else can you say that your work positively impacted more than 350 million users?

But don't take my words for it, go to our interns website and check out our interns presentations.

We also have both full-time and internship positions available on our careers page. Don't be shy, check it out and send us your resume!

Starting next week, we'll be attending a few career fairs and also hosting some info sessions, and we hope to meet you then! For more information regarding our program, you can always drop by #interns on IRC (irc.mozilla.org).